Rita,
following your suggestion in yesterday´s message, let me tell you all what has kept me busy the last few days:
One
With lots of help from Kathleen Harness and Bert Freudenberg, I have been translating some of the Etoys Quick Guides that Kathleen offers at:
Quite a few had been translated by Sdenka Salas Pilco of Perú but fortunately Kathleen keeps generating new ones and that´s what creates the need to accelerate the translation process.
I am quite enthusiastic and optimistic about the increased interest in Etoys and the use of computers in the schools in Uruguay.
Hope the translations to Spanish of these excellent guides will help keep this interest very much alive and growing.
In the near future I will start publishing this guides, which are Etoys projects themselves, in the Squeakland Showcase.
I keep watching the list of Squeakers at
http://squeakland.org/squeakers/
and specifically the summary table at the end of that page.
Uruguay is currently number two on this table of number of squeakers per country.
It is quickly approaching position number one.
Two
To do my best with the translations I am spending the necessary time to understand well what they teach, by following the examples.
This made me realize a few important things:
- I have forgotten a lot of the many interesting things I had learned, particularly through Tim Falconer´s videos.
- How many things I have learned these days by studying the Quick Guides.
- How lazy I had been, not using them before.
- How interesting it is how much we learn when presented the information in small bites.
I have a tendency I understand is quite common, to try to learn everything before I start using my newly acquired knowledge.
This is probably why until recently I had not paid much attention to Kathleen´s Quick Guides.
I was looking for some place where I could study everything about Etoys before really using this interesting application.
And this was my unconscious attitude in spite of having assured so many about how easy it is to use Etoys!
I believe this has to do with my educational background in uruguayan schools that follow the traditional european ideas quite different from the U.S. schools´s practice of learning by doing.
Interesting to read the recent comments from Mike Dawson of Afghanistan, who has made similar observations based on his south asian experience.
Three
I have been quite active reading and writing at several forums.
In addition to this one, I usually follow:
olpc-sur@lists.laptop.org olpc-uruguay-request@lists.laptop.org maho@realness.org
Four
With the enthusiasm from learning a few things with the Quick Guides, and before forgetting everything again, I created a new project which I published earlier today.
You may see it and download it at the Squeakland showcase:
Calculo Pi Aguja (2010-Aug-31 9:15 EDT) by Carlos Rabassa, RAP Ceibal <carlos>
Please open it, it is both in English and Spanish.
Five
I am trying to find the time to study this page
The Culture of the Web | Fame Foundry http://www.famefoundry.com/3883/the-culture-of-the-web/
it is a quite interesting explanation about how information is flowing these days and how to learn and take advantage of this situation brought to us by internet and the torrent of information it produces.
Carlos Rabassa Volunteer Plan Ceibal Support Network Montevideo, Uruguay